Saturday, September 19, 2009

Remembering to remember to remember...

Bill likes the background stuff...

Well sure, it is kinda interesting. I think I've mentioned I wrote a book (never published, but I put a lot of work into it). I put the first part up here on WKT. When I move to the new site I'll post the whole thing. It doesn't really matter now. And if I wrote about all this now, it would be quite different (I was in a VERY different frame of mind).

Anyway... I was thinking about back then when I was looking into the case. I was thinking just how easily everything fell into place. It's odd, when you think of it things could have gone quite differently.

It all sort of came together over a weekend in Quebec in March 2002. The SQ gave me a little room with a file box full of papers to go over. I sat in there all day with my little Larousse dictionary (because my French was not very good back then). I pored over witness statements given to the police (basically 110 testimonials by students), and a picture emerged quite quickly: Theresa was a good student, she didn't do drugs, and she hitchhiked; that's it.

The big "reveal" came later that afternoon when I had the luck to run into Gerry Cutting from Champlain College (who was STILL teaching there) and he said quite bluntly that he always thought Theresa was murdered. Understand that at this point the school didn't know what I was up to and was initially very open and candid. It was only later in the Summer when the story broke that they lawyered-up.

Then you just had the geography of the place. The first bit of luck was that nothing had changed in 25 years. I was expecting development, stuffed that was referenced to be gone, etc... None of that. The police station was the same one my parents went to. The cafeteria where Theresa was last seen? There. The Lion Pub? There. The student residence abandoned for 25 years in the country? There, perfectly preserved. The place where she was found - I was expecting a sprawling suburb? Nope. Apart from trees growing and paved roads rather than gravel? There.

So once you had the geography perfectly preserved it took you about a good night's sleep to realize that everything added up to foul play and murder - nothing else fit.

And the final piece was going to the Champlain library and being handed - practically on a silver platter - newspapers from the 70s that documented a continued history of sexual assaults and rapes over a period of five years in Lennoxville. AND students crying out for help to whatever editorial would allow their voices to be heard.

The feeling was one of pride of course, because you had discovered something BIG, but also doubt (this couldn't be ME that was putting all this together)... and complete disbelief (how could everyone have missed this?). And then menace (maybe they deliberately wanted to "miss this").

This last point is why I can't fully appreciate Roch Gaudreault as an Inspector Clouseau type (as my good friend Bill commented). Clouseau is a bumbling and endearing fool who somehow manages to get things right. Roch was none of that. He deliberately obfuscated the truth (for what intention, I still haven't figured that out). So it disgusts me that he was passing on to young police candidates his methods. It disgusts me that he was the lead detective on Theresa's case, Manon Dube's and Louise Camirand's and he was too lazy (or a motive much worse possibly) to lift a finger to grasp the true nature of these crimes. And he disgusts me because all three cases remain unsolved.

And finally.... Clouseau was one of Theresa's favorite characters, she used to do an impression of him. So Rocky as Clouseau? I don't think so.

2 Comments:

Whenever I had solved a mystery, I went through all the same phases.Pride - Check me out! I figured it out!Doubt - Could I possibly be the only one who figured this out?Complete Disbelief - Why can't everyone else see this?and Menace - Why are people trying to cover this up?

Concerning Roch Gaudreault, Terry Roth brought up the same point with me a while back. In his career, Gaudreault only had three murders to solve. Why didn't he solve them? He could be having a comfortable retirement by now, instead of driving an old car and working for a small detective agency. What was his incentive for just closing the books, instead of investigating the cases? Perhaps we will never know.

As far as comparing him with Inspector Clouseau, I have missed an obvious point. Clouseau often succeeded, in spite of himself. Gaudreault never did.

I'm sorry we'll never get to hear Theresa's imitation of Clouseau. I'm sure we all would have loved it.

"Who is the dude, whose theories construed, to cause the whole case to get screwed?"